How integrating BI tools improves your customer relationships
Your customer data is the lifeblood of your business, and this information is a powerful tool for better understanding how your customers interact with your brand. In order to develop a loyal customer base, you need to know what your customers want, how they behave, and how loyal they are. Customer data is the most valuable asset in your business because it can help you understand what products or services you should focus on offering and how best to market them to meet those needs.
Business intelligence, or BI, is what is needed to gather, interpret, and report on this data using powerful dashboards that can be easily viewed by all the relevant stakeholders in your organization.
You cannot expect to gain a foothold in a market segment without directly serving the needs of your customers or the niche market. You need strong BI tools to gather this information so you can transform lukewarm customer relationships into loyal brand ambassadors.
How does big data change a customer experience?
Big data is all around us, and it can help your business in more ways than you may realize. When implemented correctly, big data can be used to track customer behavior and create a personalized experience for each individual. Understanding the phases of the customer journey can help you determine where your customer’s needs are strongest, so you can cater to them.
After all, customers aren’t just buying products. They are investing in a brand they trust and a platform that meets their needs. When you have a clear picture of these needs from top to bottom, thanks to big data, BI, and analytics tools, you can better understand which direction the company should move in.
From there, it’s about finding out what makes those customers tick and what gets them excited about your product or service before they even buy it. By creating meaningful content targeted toward your audience based on their behaviors and browsing patterns, you’ll be able to provide them with the most efficient user experience possible, which will lead to more conversions over time.
BI helps you test and experiment
By using a business intelligence platform to integrate data from all of your existing tools, your team can access valuable insights in real-time and use that information to create experiments and test hypotheses. Testing lets you learn about your customers, products, and business as a whole. With this data at hand, you can make informed decisions to improve your company’s performance.
Business intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing data across your business—especially customer-related data—to gain valuable insights. These insights help inform important decisions about how to drive growth for the company.
The most successful companies out there approach their operations with an analytical mindset. They identify areas for improvement, formulate hypotheses on how those improvements might be achieved, then test those hypotheses by running small experiments in the real world (i.e., A/B testing). This process helps them iterate on their product offerings or processes to become more competitive and provide greater value over time.
BI for communication
BI tools can help improve your communication and collaboration with employees across departments. It allows you to inform other employees about how the business is doing by sharing insights in your data. This information can encourage more efficient, data-backed decision-making instead of decisions based on assumptions or hunches. It also reduces the chance of miscommunication since everyone has access to the same information at the same time.
Many BI tools include interactive dashboards that enable users to drill into reports for more detail, allowing you to discuss data in real-time and make decisions accordingly.
For example, if a trend stands out from your dashboard, you could “collaborate” by drilling down into the report and exploring issues in real-time so that relevant stakeholders are aware of what’s going on in your company at all times.
Creating a single source of truth
A unified view of customers improves collaboration across all departments and the quality of the decisions being made. It increases transparency and makes it easier for employees to do their jobs, which results in higher productivity and better performance overall. The improved internal workflow leads to a better user experience for your customers. Having all this information at hand empowers your teams to make informed decisions that will help drive the business forward and lead to increased revenue and improved customer retention rates in the long run.
Real-time customer insights
Real-time insights, or the ability to see data as soon as it has been collected, are extremely valuable when it comes to customer behavior and intent. Real-time insights give you a complete picture of your customer’s true needs and how best to address them from social media and online search history to campaign results and geographic location data. This allows you to address issues at the moment so that they don’t move over to the competition before you can act.
To get this level of insight, businesses need tools like real-time dashboards with dynamic updates, customizable workflows for alerts based on key performance indicators (KPIs), and other types of business intelligence software that can be integrated with sales and marketing platforms.
Social media is a great example. Real-time data from social media monitoring tools can allow companies to engage with customers whenever they need assistance or have questions about products/services. This includes responding when there is a negative sentiment about your business or brand to prevent further damage.
Informed decision making about customer predictions
One of the main reasons businesses seek to implement business intelligence tools into their operations is to gain a more holistic and informed understanding of their customer base. This is because the current landscape of doing business has become increasingly volatile, requiring savvy decision-making on an almost daily basis.
The old ways of thinking about customers and the things they want or need no longer apply, and in order to survive, businesses have to be even more creative than ever when it comes to attracting and retaining clients. This requires a nuanced approach that involves being in tune with your customers’ needs and desires on a very detailed level.
By taking advantage of BI software, you can create a complete picture of who your average customer is, where they’re located, how much money they’re likely to spend, and what kinds of other products or services might interest them in addition to what you already offer them.
Once you’ve gathered all this information about your customers’ habits, preferences, and demographics (and analyzed it), you can craft targeted campaigns that will effectively reach the people who are most interested in your products or services. This will help not only retain existing customers but also attract new ones as well, all while saving time and money by not having to appeal blindly through generic marketing tactics.
BI fosters an omnichannel customer experience
An omnichannel sales and marketing strategy is one that provides a seamless, integrated experience for customers no matter what channel or device they’re using to interact with you. It means that the customer’s needs are put first, and the customer is able to seamlessly transition from one channel to another with ease. An omnichannel experience is different from a multichannel experience in that it doesn’t exist merely as separate channels; rather, it exists as one channel across many devices.
For example, if your company sells high-end tennis shoes, you would want your websites on mobile and desktop to be consistent in terms of design. You’d also want them to work with any other platforms you sell on, including social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter, marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay, physical stores (if applicable), and so on.
BI tools allow you to uncover those spaces where your customers interact the most. It uncovers valuable insights into the multiple customer touchpoints within your organization so you can pinpoint new areas of improvement.
BI helps you get to know your customers
BI can help you get to know your customers better. With BI tools, you can analyze customer data for patterns and information about your customers’ preferences and buying habits. This empowers your team to make a more accurate forecast of what products will sell best. This helps with inventory management and ensuring that your store stocks the right items in the right quantities at the right time, which is particularly important if you sell seasonal merchandise or if there are flash sales.
BI also provides a platform for better predictions about which items will be returned and plan accordingly. You don’t want to waste money stocking dozens of an item that turns out to not be very popular or not age well because it’s seasonal (e.g., Halloween-related). You also don’t want to buy too much of an item that has a high chance of being returned because it doesn’t fit right, isn’t what the customer expected, or for some other reason.
Most importantly, you can gather feedback from focus groups about how various features are received by users who try them out before they’re released to the general public in order to improve them accordingly.
That is only in relation to inventory. Imagine those same capabilities spread across all aspects of your business to customer interactions. BI is the wave of future customer satisfaction and can be implemented without a great deal of hassle by your or your team.
